How much does it cost to transcribe a one-hour interview?

About $119 from a human service at the common rate of $1.99 an audio minute, and $161 for a focus group at $2.69. Automated transcription paid as you go is around $10 an hour (Sonix), NVivo's add-on is €28.50 an hour, and subscriptions that meter audio hours bring it under $1 an hour. Typing it yourself costs nothing but about six hours of your time.

How long does it take to transcribe a one-hour interview?

About four hours for a professional transcriptionist, which is the figure the transcription industry quotes. A researcher typing their own interview usually needs five to eight hours, and Bailey (2008, Family Practice) puts the floor at three hours per hour of talk, rising to ten when pauses, overlaps, and gestures are transcribed. Automated transcription returns the same hour in minutes, plus a read-through to correct names and speakers.

How long does it take to transcribe a 30-minute interview?

About two hours for a professional and three for most people typing their own recording. A detailed transcript with pauses and overlaps can take five hours.

How much does it cost to transcribe interviews for a dissertation?

A typical qualitative dissertation of 20 one-hour interviews is 20 audio hours. That is about $2,388 by human transcription, €570 in NVivo credits, $200 at Sonix's pay-as-you-go rate, $12 to $50 on a monthly subscription that covers 20 hours, and roughly 120 hours of typing if you do it yourself.

Does transcription cost more when several people speak?

With human services it often does. Landmark Associates charges $2.69 a minute for focus groups against $1.99 for one-to-one interviews. Automated services charge the same per hour regardless of speakers, but overlapping voices are where their speaker labels go wrong, so budget more correction time.

Why does the same study cost more on some subscriptions?

Monthly plans cap how much clears in one cycle, so a study larger than one month's allowance is billed for however many months it takes. Some plans also cap uploads by file count, which can stretch a study across more months than its hours alone would need.

Does a longer interview cost more than two short ones?

On anything metered by audio hour, no. One 90-minute interview and three 30-minute interviews cost the same. On plans that count files, the three short ones cost three times as much of the allowance, and on plans that cap recording length the 90-minute one comes back truncated.

Is it cheaper to transcribe interviews yourself?

Only if your time is free. Twenty one-hour interviews take about 120 hours to type, three working weeks, where automated transcription and a read-through take a few days. Typing a few interviews yourself is still a close first reading of the data, which is the one thing automation does not replace.

Is free local transcription a serious option?

Yes, for a single study. noScribe is free and MacWhisper Pro is €64 once, both running Whisper on your own machine, so nothing leaves it. Processing is slower than a cloud service on an ordinary laptop, and speaker labels need fixing by hand. What they do not do is keep a corpus searchable across rounds or share it with anyone.

What does Phonotheca charge?

Solo is $12 a month for 20 audio hours and Pro is $29 for 50, which works out at $0.60 and $0.58 an audio hour. Three hours are free once, and the archive, search, tagging, and export keep working whether or not you pay again.

Calculator

Interview transcription cost calculator

Transcribing a one-hour interview costs about $119 from a human service, around $10 from automated transcription paid as you go, and under $1 on a subscription that meters audio hours. Typing it yourself takes a professional about four hours and most researchers five to eight. Enter your own interviews below for the hours, the typing time, and what each route charges.

Free, and nothing is sent anywhere. Every vendor price was checked on the vendor's own pricing page in October 2026, and the sources are listed at the end.

Interviews

Average length

Minutes per recording

Voices per recording

Total audio

12 hours

Typing it yourself

72 hours

At 6 hours per audio hour, typical for a researcher with average typing.

A professional typist

48 hours

At 4 hours per audio hour, the transcription industry standard.

Paid by the hour

Landmark Associates, human transcription

$1.99 an audio minute, $2.69 for focus groups of three or more

$1,433

Rev, human transcription

$1.99 an audio minute, no listed surcharge for extra speakers

$1,433

Happy Scribe, human transcription

From €1.75 an audio minute

€1,260

NVivo Transcription, by the hour

€28.50 an hour, bought on top of an NVivo licence

€342

NVivo Transcription, yearly bundle

€475 for 50 hours a year, on top of an NVivo licence

€475

Sonix, pay as you go

$10 an audio hour, no subscription

$120

Paid by the month

Monthly allowances cap how much of a study clears in one cycle, so the total below is the subscription multiplied by the months the volume needs.

Phonotheca Solo

20 audio hours a month, archive and search included

$12

Phonotheca Pro

50 audio hours a month

$29

Otter Basic

Free, 300 minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation, 3 imports for the life of the account

Does not fit

Each recording is capped at 30 minutes, so a 60-minute interview is cut short.

Only 3 file imports are allowed for the life of the account, against 12 interviews.

Otter Pro

1,200 minutes and 10 imports a month, 90 minutes per recording

$33.98

2 months at $16.99

The allowance covers the hours, but 10 uploads a month spreads 12 interviews over 2 months.

Otter Business

Uncapped minutes and imports, 4 hours per recording

$30

Happy Scribe Pro

600 minutes a month, overage at €0.20 a minute

€58

2 months at €29

Sonix Advanced

20 hours a month, overage at $10 an hour

$50

On your own computer

Paid once or free, whatever the volume. The audio never leaves your machine, and speaker labels usually need fixing by hand.

noScribe

Open source, runs Whisper on your own computer

Free

MacWhisper Pro

Paid once, runs Whisper on your own Mac

€64

Vendor prices as published in October 2026, each shown in the currency its vendor lists, with no conversion applied. Tax is excluded throughout. Totals for 12 interviewsuse each vendor's list price before volume discounts.

Worked examples

Five common studies run through the same prices the calculator uses. Human transcription is Landmark Associates' published rate, which matches Rev's $1.99 a minute for one-to-one interviews and adds a focus-group rate. Subscription totals are the monthly price multiplied by the months the study needs.

Study	Audio	Typing it yourself	Human service	NVivo, hourly	Sonix, pay as you go	Otter Pro	Phonotheca Solo
One 60-minute interview	1 hour	6 hours	$119	€28.50	$10	$16.99	$12
A UX round, 12 sessions of 45 minutes	9 hours	54 hours	$1,075	€257	$90	$33.98 (2 months)	$12
A dissertation, 20 interviews of an hour	20 hours	120 hours	$2,388	€570	$200	$33.98 (2 months)	$12
Six focus groups of 90 minutes	9 hours	54 hours	$1,453	€257	$90	$16.99	$12
A funded project, 40 interviews of an hour	40 hours	240 hours	$4,776	€1,140	$400	$67.96 (4 months)	$24 (2 months)

Prices as published in October 2026, tax excluded, in each vendor's own currency. Otter Pro allows 10 file imports a month, which is why a study of more than 10 recordings takes several months on it.

The dissertation case, step by step

Twenty interviews of an hour each is 20 audio hours. At Rev's $1.99 a minute that is 1,200 minutes and $2,388. Through NVivo's transcription add-on it is €570 bought by the hour, or €475 for the 50-hour yearly bundle, in both cases on top of the NVivo licence. Sonix pay as you go is $200. A subscription with a 20-hour monthly allowance clears it in one month, which is $12 on Phonotheca Solo and $50 on Sonix Advanced. Typed by hand at six hours per audio hour, it is 120 hours, about three working weeks before any analysis starts.

Ethics boards often ask where the audio is processed and how long the provider keeps it. That answer matters more than the price for most committees, and it is covered on transcribing interviews for a dissertation and the data governance page.

How long it takes to transcribe an interview

The figure quoted most often is four hours of typing for every hour of audio. That is the transcription industry's standard for a trained transcriptionist working on clear two-person audio, as Ditto Transcripts and Happy Scribe both state it. People who do not transcribe for a living are slower. Ditto puts beginners at six to eight hours, and audiotranskription, who make the f4 transcription software, advise planning five to eight times the interview length and report an average of about 6.3 in their own measurements.

The academic reference most methods courses cite is Bailey, First steps in qualitative data analysis, transcribing (Family Practice, 2008, 25(2), 127 to 131). It gives at least three hours per hour of talk, and up to ten when the transcript records pauses, overlaps, and visual detail. The calculator uses four hours for a professional and six for typing it yourself, which sits in the middle of the published ranges for clean audio. Accents, crosstalk, a noisy café, or a focus group push every figure up.

Interview length	Professional, 4×	Typing it yourself, 6×	Detailed transcript, 10×
30 minutes	2 hours	3 hours	5 hours
45 minutes	3 hours	4 hours 30 minutes	7 hours 30 minutes
60 minutes	4 hours	6 hours	10 hours
90 minutes	6 hours	9 hours	15 hours

Automated transcription changes the arithmetic rather than the ratio. An hour of audio comes back in minutes, and the work left is a read-through against the recording to fix names, jargon, and speaker turns.

What moves the number

Audio hours drive almost everything. A study is the number of interviews multiplied by their average length, and every vendor that meters honestly meters that. Where quotes diverge wildly for the same study, the difference is usually a human typing against a model transcribing.

File counts are the second variable, and the one that surprises people. Several tools price a monthly allowance in minutes and then cap the number of files you may upload against it, so a round of short interviews exhausts the upload counter long before the minutes. Recording length caps work the same way. Where a plan stops at 30 or 90 minutes per file, a long life history is transcribed up to the cap. The Otter.ai limits on every plan show how this plays out on one popular tool.

Voices matter for human services, which charge more for focus groups, and for automated ones they change what you get rather than what you pay. Two-person interviews separate cleanly. Focus groups with overlap are where every automated tool struggles, which is why agencies still send facility recordings to human transcription.

Licences hide the rest. NVivo and ATLAS.ti sell transcription as an add-on on top of the seat, so the full NVivo price is the licence plus the hours. And the cost that appears in no quote is what happens after the transcript arrives. A study is re-read, re-searched, and quoted from for months, and a transcript sitting in a downloads folder gets searched by opening files one at a time.

See how a whole study is handled

Where each price comes from

Each figure was read from the vendor's own pricing page in October 2026, before tax, in the currency the vendor lists. Phonotheca's own prices are on the pricing page. If a vendor has changed a price since, the calculator is out of date until the next check.

Landmark Associates, human transcription · $1.99 an audio minute, $2.69 for focus groups of three or morethelai.com/pricing
Rev, human transcription · $1.99 an audio minute, no listed surcharge for extra speakersrev.com/pricing
Happy Scribe, human transcription · From €1.75 an audio minutehappyscribe.com/pricing
NVivo Transcription, by the hour · €28.50 an hour, bought on top of an NVivo licenceshop.lumivero.com/qda-and-research/nvivo
NVivo Transcription, yearly bundle · €475 for 50 hours a year, on top of an NVivo licenceshop.lumivero.com/qda-and-research/nvivo
Sonix, pay as you go · $10 an audio hour, no subscriptionsonix.ai/pricing
Otter Basic · Free, free, 300 minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation, 3 imports for the life of the accountotter.ai/pricing
Otter Pro · $16.99 a month, 1,200 minutes and 10 imports a month, 90 minutes per recordingotter.ai/pricing
Otter Business · $30 a month, uncapped minutes and imports, 4 hours per recordingotter.ai/pricing
Happy Scribe Pro · €29 a month, 600 minutes a month, overage at €0.20 a minutehappyscribe.com/pricing
Sonix Advanced · $50 a month, 20 hours a month, overage at $10 an hoursonix.ai/pricing
noScribe · Freegithub.com/kaixxx/noScribe
MacWhisper Pro · €64 oncemacwhisper.com

Common questions about cost and time

How much does it cost to transcribe a one-hour interview?: About $119 from a human service at the common rate of $1.99 an audio minute, and $161 for a focus group at $2.69. Automated transcription paid as you go is around $10 an hour (Sonix), NVivo's add-on is €28.50 an hour, and subscriptions that meter audio hours bring it under $1 an hour. Typing it yourself costs nothing but about six hours of your time.
How long does it take to transcribe a one-hour interview?: About four hours for a professional transcriptionist, which is the figure the transcription industry quotes. A researcher typing their own interview usually needs five to eight hours, and Bailey (2008, Family Practice) puts the floor at three hours per hour of talk, rising to ten when pauses, overlaps, and gestures are transcribed. Automated transcription returns the same hour in minutes, plus a read-through to correct names and speakers.
How long does it take to transcribe a 30-minute interview?: About two hours for a professional and three for most people typing their own recording. A detailed transcript with pauses and overlaps can take five hours.
How much does it cost to transcribe interviews for a dissertation?: A typical qualitative dissertation of 20 one-hour interviews is 20 audio hours. That is about $2,388 by human transcription, €570 in NVivo credits, $200 at Sonix's pay-as-you-go rate, $12 to $50 on a monthly subscription that covers 20 hours, and roughly 120 hours of typing if you do it yourself.
Does transcription cost more when several people speak?: With human services it often does. Landmark Associates charges $2.69 a minute for focus groups against $1.99 for one-to-one interviews. Automated services charge the same per hour regardless of speakers, but overlapping voices are where their speaker labels go wrong, so budget more correction time.
Why does the same study cost more on some subscriptions?: Monthly plans cap how much clears in one cycle, so a study larger than one month's allowance is billed for however many months it takes. Some plans also cap uploads by file count, which can stretch a study across more months than its hours alone would need.
Does a longer interview cost more than two short ones?: On anything metered by audio hour, no. One 90-minute interview and three 30-minute interviews cost the same. On plans that count files, the three short ones cost three times as much of the allowance, and on plans that cap recording length the 90-minute one comes back truncated.
Is it cheaper to transcribe interviews yourself?: Only if your time is free. Twenty one-hour interviews take about 120 hours to type, three working weeks, where automated transcription and a read-through take a few days. Typing a few interviews yourself is still a close first reading of the data, which is the one thing automation does not replace.
Is free local transcription a serious option?: Yes, for a single study. noScribe is free and MacWhisper Pro is €64 once, both running Whisper on your own machine, so nothing leaves it. Processing is slower than a cloud service on an ordinary laptop, and speaker labels need fixing by hand. What they do not do is keep a corpus searchable across rounds or share it with anyone.
What does Phonotheca charge?: Solo is $12 a month for 20 audio hours and Pro is $29 for 50, which works out at $0.60 and $0.58 an audio hour. Three hours are free once, and the archive, search, tagging, and export keep working whether or not you pay again.

Keep reading

For a dissertation or thesisA doctoral round transcribed, searchable through the writing years.Best transcription software for qualitative researchNine tools priced per audio hour, free local options included.NVivo pricingLicence list, the add-ons on top, and when a site licence settles it.Otter.ai limits on every planMinute budgets, conversation caps, and import counts, in audio hours.Compared to RevTranscription bought per file against a corpus you keep.GDPR-compliant transcriptionEU processing, zero retention, and the paperwork on a public page.

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